> Thank goodness. Mitchell Baker was running Mozilla into the ground while stuffing her pockets.
Can you please elaborate more on this and ideally provide some examples ?
Can you please elaborate more on this and ideally provide some examples ?
- Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563698
- Mozilla CEO says layoffs needed amid shift from browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23332810
- Mozilla cuts 250 jobs, says Firefox development will be affected: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firef...
I agree about the pay.
No one is complaining about Mozilla's layoffs in a void. Even if they were no layoffs whatsoever, the facts remains:
1. Firefox was neglected and lost a massive market share.
2. Executives were flourishing while the ship was going under
Mozilla's layoffs were just a more tangible symptom of her strategy that the browser is a low-priority.
What is the factual basis for saying that Firefox was neglected? Lots of stuff is repeated around here, but it's not impression from any facts.
Interesting, what do you attribute Firefox's bleeding out marketshare steadily over the past decade to if not neglect from leadership? Strategy is at the core of the CEO role and other executives.
Mitchell Baker actually stated herself, I think in 2020 at the time of layoffs, that Mozilla needed to focus on stuff like decentralized web, artificial intelligence, security and privacy network, etc. So yes it seems evident that the browser was neglected to pursue other endeavors, that mind you, didn't see much success either.
An obvious alternative explanation - really the null hypothesis, IMHO - is competition from Google. Google has much greater brand power, engineering resources, and marketing power than anyone. They could advertise Chrome across their incredibly popular ecosystem, including on the (possibly) most popular page on the Internet, https://www.google.com.
Chrome is a pretty good product, too, and didn't have legacy code like Gecko to deal with. I'm not sure what any Mozilla CEO could do.
Maybe facing those odds, it was better to invest in other things too. Mozilla's mission isn't a web browser, but to make the web free and (private).
I donno, maybe not firing the engineers while giving herself a pay raise? Crazy I know right...
However it is factual that its marketshare (and thus, relevance (and thus, influence on the web)) has dramatically declined over the past decade or so. People complain about Mozilla's tech side quests (and occasionally people complain about their social-cause chases), but this is the real honest complaint. Firefox is trending toward irrelevancy, while Google has gradually taken control of this market. Meanwhile, CEO compensation has gone up (amid layoffs in the ZIRP era, for that matter).
If other children stick their hands into the fire, will you stuck your too?
Seriously, people who run company should make decisions that are useful for the company, not parrot what others are doing.
Firefox was neglected for years, they did not tackle requests of users (customization, addons), but spend tens of millions (if not hundreds) on everything else. Then they started to run out of cash, so instead of focusing on their CORE PRODUCT they started firing developers.. because it is popular?
"Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%".
Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let that go on for a generation or two and people forget all about FF. They cannot compete against that.
As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.
For another data point we can look at Thunderbird, another Mozilla project. Thunderbird had started stagnating. It was borderline abandoned for a while, until Mozilla made it official.
The community tried to catch the discarded codebase and keep it alive, Thunderbird got a new home. Remember we're talking about a desktop email client in the age where a couple major companies entirely own email, as a concept. Email _is_ Gmail and Outlook, it's not even close to a fair fight for a small third party email client to compete against that.
Nevertheless, Thunderbird is growing again.
https://fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-2024-2728-...
A notification on a website stating that one must use another browser is a sign of utter incompetence or ignorance.
And yes, there is an extension for that. Which is unofficial, requires you to do hacky things (such as installing a whole separate Firefox runtime), and still doesn't fully support things like notifications.
Some examples that come to mind are multiple profiles, history manager, and bookmark manager.
See some previous discussions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876696
I think that it's not a UI/UX thing, honestly they are almost exactly the same thing (tabs, URL bar, webpage). The difference is that people use what they are given, and when you are Google it's easier to be seen by everybody.
The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.
---
Multi-account containers are a cool idea, but they are somewhat power-user-oriented. Ordinary users often don't grasp the concept of cookies, let alone understand the extension's description.
> Under the hood, it separates website storage into tab-specific Containers. Cookies downloaded by one Container are not available to other Containers.
I would bet that the immense majority of users don't use Chrome profiles either.
That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Current UI trends are terrible.
Middle-aged users are already using Firefox if they value the open web, but young users will be driven away by the 2000-ish UI. Mozilla cannot attract new users if they can't keep up with the design trend.
The best solution I can think of is making fancy UI the default but also making it possible for power users to switch back to the old UI.
My intuition is that the vast majority of people use the first browser they are exposed to, even if it is IE6. People are exposed to Google Chrome first, it's not a question of UI/UX.
Otherwise, why would the vast majority of people use Google Chrome instead of one of the gazillion Chromium-based clones? The UX is the same, right?
Firefox has all those things.
Multiple profiles' UX is not user-friendly at all. You need to either type "about:profiles" in the address bar or start the desired profile from the command line.
The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.
Mozilla’s CEO for its decline (setting aside Eich’s brief stint) was Gary Kovacs and Chris Beard.
The point is that it doesn't have to be typical, nor should it be. There's no universal law of reality which says that CEO pay must forever go up exponentially. It is bad behavior when other companies do it, it was bad behavior when Mozilla did it, and it deserves the criticism it is getting.
Anyone have a blogpost/video/guide on the basics of reading financial statements? I definitely could brush up on whats important within these statements and how to better interpret them....
Edit: the reason I replied here, was because I wanted to see how the company did during her tenure as CEO. That was the leap my brain took.
Microsoft has grown faster and larger than Google from 2013 to 2013: 1000% compared to Google 400%
Firefox relative market share down by 90% is a ripple effect of Google generous donations, creating a disincentive for innovation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/yy986k/can_someon...